> WHY MONGOLIA? - DIARY - AUDIO & ARTICLES

the tuul river

traditional ger

performing on bogd mountain

For most of my life I have been fascinated by the country of Mongolia. On most world maps it is tantalisingly devoid of much information. One city, one railroad stretching north to south, and one word: Gobi. This is a country with the population of approx 2.5 million (a third of the population of London) spread over an area the size of Western Europe. This averages 1.4 people per square kilometre! A third of the population lives in the capital city, Ulaanbaatar, with the other two-thirds scattered around the country living a nomadic lifestyle that has changed very little since the days of Chinggis Khan in the 13th Century.

And then there's the music. Mongolia is home to the discipline of Khoomei, or overtone singing. The wide open spaces, the sounds of the wind through the forests, through the spaces between the logs in cabins, through the gaps in tent canopies, has given birth to a harmonically rich music. A music created not from the unnatural practices of Equal Temperament, but from the universality of the harmonic series, omnipresent and unavoidable in every sound ever made. Composers like LaMonte Young, Terry Riley, Glenn Branca and Alvin Lucier, have founded their unique musical approaches on this same system: the natural harmonic series. It is older than 'Early Music' and fresher sounding than the most avant-garde of music, since it stands out as unearthly, strange and ethereal to our western ears still recovering from two centuries of equal temperament.

A Sabbatical of sorts
A Sabbatical is a time-honoured way for an artist to take a step back from their art and consider it from a different perspective. It is a deliberate act of taking oneself outside of any 'comfort-zones', if you like, that may exist in their personal and public spheres. It is a way to keep one's artistic senses alert and open to new, most likely unexpected, influences.

People's responses to my decision have fallen quite sharply into two distinct camps. I call them the 'Why?' and 'Wow!' camps. My own personal reasons for taking a year-long sabbatical at this stage in my musical career are threefold:

1. To eliminate the danger of settling into a 'safe' compositional and/or performance style;
2. To devote myself exclusively to my 2 = 1 = 0 Project - A Year of Solo Performance; and
3. To discover what effect exposure to a different culture will have on my composition and performance.

So at the end of April 2006, Hannah and I shall be embarking upon the journey to Ulaanbaatar, flying out of Birmingham International to Moscow, then, after a couple of days sightseeing, riding the Trans-Siberian Express for 5 days, arriving in UB at the beginning of May. This section of the website will function as an online diary, gallery and whatever else I decide to put up here to document the trials, tribulations and hopefully triumphs of the coming year!

"The Mongolians don't say the grass is greener on the other side of the fence. There are no fences." - British Explorer Benedict Allen, from "Edge of Blue Heaven", June 1997